Joy in literature?

[Jean-Baptiste]

I have a question for everyone, and by Everyone I do not mean Gertrude Stein. I wonder if literature is capable of distributing joy. By joy, I mean something distinct from happiness. It seems that there are plenty of examples of disgust in literature, like that given by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor (don't get me wrong, I love them both (I love that they are both capable of making me nauseous)) and there are stories that can make the reader happy, though admittedly I am more often made happy by the presentation than the outcome of a story. I know of one instance where a reader may find joy (in my limited definition of the term) in reading, and that is in reading letters of love or friendship that are actually addressed to them. However, I don't believe that any third party reader of letters is going to recieve the joy that the addressee felt on reading them. They may feel happy and contented that there is love in the world, but that does not translate into joy. So, can you think of any particular titles that would fulfill my criteria for joy?
Question one, part two:
Do you think that real joy is capable of being distributed through writing?
Question one, part three:
Perhaps joy could be distributed to all readers by something addressed to all readers, which most books are not. Could the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson fall into this catagory? Though it was technically addressed to King George III, it seems to be rather universal in import and addressed to humanity. Believe that I don't want a political discussion, and that I do try to keep my admiration of TJ from clouding my judgment, but sometimes I need to be set straight.
I hope my question is clear.

[mono]

Your question seems very philosophical and worth pondering, yet, most of all, also appears greatly directed by personal opinion. Can literature make a person feel a certain way (joy, sadness, anger, etc.)? This answer, I guarantee, will seem diverse, ranging from person to person.
In my opinion, if you ask, no, literature (or any art) cannot compel a person to feel a certain way, including joy. Rather, a person derives emotion from his/her interpretation of literature (and all art); a perfect example seems evident in how a person may interpret one book/poem/song/painting/sculpture as joyful, and another person as sad or angry (take The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, for example). On another aspect, the direct message of a literary piece may appear clear and have many shared interpretations, such as you gave Thomas Jefferson's Declaration Of Independence as an example; this may bring several people joy, including a whole country, yet I still believe the joy comes from a shared interpretation, rather than intrinsically from the document.
To answer your second question, if joy (or any emotion) seems able in distribution to writing - absolutely, in my opinion. An individual's interpretation of another's writings does not necessarily have to involve the same meaning, intention, and overall theme or feeling of the literary work. To the writer, this literary piece exists as an entire expression of joy, sadness, or anger, thereby distributing the emotion through words (in most cases), yet the interpretation of which brings a reader the same, or different, emotion.

[Virgil]

I'm a little confused by what you mean, Jean. Do you mean the author expressing the nature of joy or the reader feeling joy from reading the work? The first thing I thought of after I read your post was William Blake's Songs of Innocence. Here's the Introduction to it, very fitting to the subject at hand, I think.


Introduction to Songs of Innocence By William Blake

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again;"
So I piped: he wept to hear.

"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!"
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read."
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear

[Jean-Baptiste]

Thanks for the excellent replies! Yes, Virgil, I mean the feeling recieved by the reader, rather than the intention of the writer. Perhaps I make too many distinctions. And yes, Mono, I agree with your point about Dante; it makes me think of how depressing and hopeless (in a good way) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot is to me, and how lovely and sweet all of my friends take it to be. And so I think William Blake's piece is entirely appropriate here--in that I wonder, can writing do the same thing that music can do? The distinction made here is that music, in a personal setting, can convey the emotion directly from player (piper) to listener (child)--and can I believe Blake in his intimation that by writing it down, all can indeed hear it?
Yes, perhaps it will vary from person to person; perhaps I should take a poll. That would be a very involved poll.

[byquist]

Very interesting.

Perhaps some literature that attempts to non-think or be just ultra-natural and effortless, really simple. I suppose it also has at least as much to do with the presence of the peace of mind of the recipient/reader as the literature itself.

Some environmental lit./essay-reflections that I found some joy from:

"Collecting Myself" Lester Rowntree (a woman)
"A Wind-Storm in the Forests" John Muir
"Alone on a Mountaintop" Jack Kerouac
"A Blizzard Under Blue Sky" Pam Houston

Or a perfect and precious characterization as Phoenix in Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"

Or some lyrics (which I consider literature) are originators of joy -- James Blunt's "sitting-on-a-subway"-tune was a perfect song, although he has two renditions, one R rated and one G rated.

[Jean-Baptiste]

Do these essays that you mention bring you joy (in terms of truly touching your life, or connecting your person with an enternal aspect of existence) or do you receive pleasure from them as being something that corresponds to your personal frame of reference? That is, of course, not a question to ask of a nihilist.
One of my friends pointed out to me that Kierkegaard would say that all true joy must have for its base the eternal, which seems to severely limit the scope of my query--limit it to the realm of religious writings.
I'm starting to agree with the assertions here, that the responsibility lies as much with the reader as with the writer. However, I still don't feel that that will hold up in the instance of personal letters. The recipient of a letter is not going to be allowed the same range of interpretation as the reader of a novel. So, is there not, indeed, a method of capturing that necessity of interpretation and immanence of joy in prose or poetry intended for a wide audience?

[subterranean]

Question one, part two:
Do you think that real joy is capable of being distributed through writing?

What's real joy? If there's real joy, there has to be fake one. And I agree with mono that a person derives emotion from his/her interpretation of literature, which is totally depends on the person's condition and his/her surrounding/situation. And I agree that the happiness I feel when I reading someone else's love letter, is nothing compared to the feelings of the writer and the reader that the letter is intended to. Same with novel, poems, story, which tell about specific thing (person, place, event). If we feel shocked and sad reading about the bombing of Hiroshima, our shock and sadness may not be equal with the terror and fear of those Japanese who witnessed the bombing.

[mono]

However, I still don't feel that that will hold up in the instance of personal letters. The recipient of a letter is not going to be allowed the same range of interpretation as the reader of a novel. So, is there not, indeed, a method of capturing that necessity of interpretation and immanence of joy in prose or poetry intended for a wide audience?
Good point, as I had not thought of this earlier. Perhaps the joy of the receiving and reading of a personal letter seems more to rely on the recognition of the writer. Though I dislike to confess the fact, even while reading something (a poem, short story, novel, play, etc.) by someone I knew, I still read it with a degree of recognition, and enjoyed it, nonetheless. This felt very different than from knowing someone through his/her literature, then meeting the writer, and maintaining some kind of personal correspondence; of course, they seemed far less personal than most of my friends, but I ended up reading their literature differently than that of my friends.
I suppose first impressions and interdependency really makes a difference. :D

[Jean-Baptiste]

Very good point, Mono. Though it really puts a damper on my intention of creating a novel (not that I, personally, would ever get around to it) that can undeniably spread joy; it would mean, perhaps, that the writer would have to become personally acquainted with everyone. I don't know any authors personally, but I can imagine a discrepancy caused from bias in a view of one's friends' work.
And Subterranean, this is exactly what I've been meaning to express--thanks for the example of Hiroshima--reading about something and having it touch your life are definitely different things.

[Jean-Baptiste]

Nice to meet you Jamesian!

I know what you mean about concentration, and I do agree that this can cause joy. In fact, one of the examples that I was going to give on this matter was Ulysses by James Joyce, but I wasn't sure if it actually fit into what I was seeking. You've cleared that up for me. The first time I attempted Ulysses, I read fifty pages and then decided to beat my head in with a rock. Then I started again, several years later, and finished it in 11 months of steady reading. That feeling of accomplishment was a definite joy. Then I reread it in 7 months with understanding, and after I was finished and realized that the book is much more massive than its 700 odd pages suggest, that was the first time I felt real joy from literature. However, it was not necessarily the writing that conveyed it to me--it was the awareness of a monumental task, set by one James Joyce, and accomplished by himself alone. There is something almost eternal about that demonstration of human endeavor that does not let up or waver.

So, does this joy found in Ulysses, in your opinion, stem from the authors concentration, or my own?
If my own, the problem seems hopeless, as there can be no such thing as compulsory concentration for the reader.

[John Allen]

The books that have made me smile, and helped me forget just for a moment how tough life can be, are the Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse. For me, Jeeves and Wooster are the literary equivalent to the Three Stooges. And just as with the Stooges, you either get Jeeves and Wooster or you don't. You either think Wodehouse's chonicles of Jeeves and Wooster are the stupidist, more meaningless books ever written...or you think they're hilarious...If you've never read one, give one a try...you'll either put it down unfinished and say, "This is as stupid as the Three Stooges" or you'll finish it, start reading another and think to youself, "This is as GREAT as the Three Stooges." It's all a metter of point of view...

[Jean-Baptiste]

Yes, John Allen, I have been quite in love with the Jeeves and Wooster stories for some time.
Jamesian, I really appreciate having your completed thought in one sitting. I won't reply to your entire comment point by point, as repeated expression of my concurrence would grow redundant. So I'll just say that you've given me some great advice. As for anxiety over an academic study of Joyce, I think you should put it to rest. Teachers may only be willing to present one page of Joyce to their pupils for fear of disinterest, and the fact that it's going to take a lot of explaining--two things that I can't see taking place in your education. My bit of counsel on the subject is to read that author chronologically, and grow in reading taste along with his writing style--plus many of the elements of Ulysses are not actually explained within the novel, as Joyce relied on the reader's familiarity with things that were introduced in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On the other hand, Joyce is one of those Three Stooges authors that people either love or hate. One of my professors and I were thinking of starting a Ulysses reading group, but then we decided that it would just be us two. Another of my professors hates everything about Joyce, and thinks that Ulysses is the dumbest book ever written. Hmm.
As a side comment, your writing style, or should I say Thought Process, evidences the influence of your dear Henry. That's nice to see. Anyway, I'll probably have to work on killing the despotic urge to Make the reader feel joy; perhaps that's what this whole question is about.

[byquist]

Do these essays that you mention bring you joy (in terms of truly touching your life, or connecting your person with an enternal aspect of existence) or do you receive pleasure from them as being something that corresponds to your personal frame of reference?

Well, I won't make too much of any literature touching my individual eternal existence with joy too extensively; just somewhat. Joy is a very big word. You present a very big subject.

I suppose the emphasis was about the merits of "simplicity" since some writers' and thinkers' apparent aim is to complicate everything with so much babble and discourse. Whereas, in the items I mentioned there's a tendency towards simplicity or getting out of their head, forsaking ego, almost an unmotivation or simply reflection, a letting go and merging back with nature. In some quarters I suppose that is called "non-action," or effortless action.

[Jean-Baptiste]

That is a very good point, byquist. While it completely goes against my previous statements about Ulysses, I too can see the great merit in simplicity. I could class that as joy, being that the lack of ego seems to say that the work did not really belong to the author, but was intended for the world; that gives it a measure of intimacy with everyone, and so, could place such essays in the class of personal letters. Does that do justice to your thought? I like it very much.

[byquist]

Surely so, and I respect those who can grapple with Ulysses and other substantial stuff, and those who can deal with, say, "Waiting for Godot" who Harold Bloom says Becket was near-genius. I saw a college performance and it bored me to death despite capable actors. Well, we all have diff. writers that spur our interests and intrigue, all very valid.

I can only stomach modest doses of heavy reading and often, rather, prefer film. For instance, but it even took a lot of patience, last night seeing Kurosawa's "Dersu Uzala." There's a lot of silence in that film. But in retrospect it is growing on me. Very visual film. I can't quite say the present seeing of it was joy, but in memory it is taking on an aura of delight.

Also, I once read a Wodehouse and got some laughs.